The Memory of Her
by westwerk
Summary: Snape reflects on his life: when Lily was in it, and when Lily wasn't.


**The Memory of Her**

**Past. 13 Years Old.**

What Severus Snape remembers are the cold nights deep down in the dungeons of Hogwarts. These nights could have been lonely, desolate evenings to wander and wonder, but they were not.

What Snape remembers most clearly are not the broken desks, the second-hand cauldron he hides in a cabinet far from what could be seen by certain wanderers, nor the darkness broken only by the one candle he lights instantly upon arrival, but the candle illuminating the one thing he truly can't get enough of, over his self-teachings of spells and enchantments and potions.

The biggest enchantment is her.

She, who comes at exactly nine on the weekends when Severus is most likely to be studying in seclusion.

She apologizes, thinks he doesn't want her there. On the contrary.

He wants her there. His heart aches in the moments before she shows up, before she smiles at him, her green eyes shimmering against the yellow light of the candle. Her words mean the world to him, more than anything he's ever encountered. "Hello, Sev," she says. Though simple, they are brilliant to him. "What potion are we practicing on today?"

He remembers her there, speaking to him, laughing as cheerily as ever, but he can only remember some of the words said. He wishes he could remember more, but he knows she is truly a happy soul, one he wishes he could be like. But, no, that is not possible for him because his soul is not as pure as hers. He is sure hers is as golden as the fire from the candle.

His is not.

P**resent. 32 Years old.**

What Snape remembers is that the castle is haunted.

Old souls roam the castle freely, just mere specks of souls, not the real thing- not the real thing.

He wonders how that can be. He knows they are imprints of the dearly departed, but still he scowls at them for no true reason other than the fact that they can roam freely. He can see them and feel them and they shimmer in the lights of the candles in the night.

They are as real as James Potter's son sitting in the Great Hall in the mornings, where the sun shines down through the enchanted ceiling, casting light down toward the tables. He can't see Potter's eyes from where he sits, but he knows they are exact replicas of Hers.

Nothing else resembles her. Nothing. Only his eyes.

He is haunted.

**Past. 14 Years Old.**

"What do you think happens when we die?" Snape remembers. He'd asked her this before she had begun to miss their meetings. Those missed meetings tore Snape's heart to pieces. He could look at her still, during the day, and still call her his Best Friend, but at night, when he stood alone in front of his steaming cauldron (the only thing shimmering under the light of the one candle besides the hot tears he forces to stay in his tearducts) he could not call her his Best Friend.

"When we die?" Lily had said. "I think the only way to find out is to die."

At the time, Snape had nodded, thinking that that had been the best way to put it, because it came from her, before she began to get mad at him. Though her soul is still, he is sure, golden, it is before bad things begin to taint her; the awareness of evil.

**Present. 33 Years Old.**

He remembers he was not haunted then, before the Dark Lord.

But there were things that haunted him, days months and years later. He was haunted and haunted and haunted by those shimmering eyes that she has passed down to her son.

The truth and answer to his question, wondering what would happen when people dies, is more simple than he would have ever thought.

**Past. 16 Years Old.**

Snape remembers many things. He knows his brain is able to fit many things, but loneliness is something he once believed he had filled his brain's capacity of.

He shouldn't have called her that. Mudblood. I don't need help from filthy little Mudbloods like her!

He is very used to loneliness, having spent much of his childhood ignored by other children who judged him precisely by his snide personality down to his second hand clothes. They thought him strange.

That loneliness happened to be made worse by the screams and the insults and the smacks he could hear at night through his almost paperthin walls at Spinner's End. There he was alone and terrified, hoping with all hope that his father would never, once he was finished with his mother, come into his room and give him the same Punishment.

For years, he had no one to call a friend.

Snape wants one more than he wants the screams and insults and smacks to die down in his head during those nights he lays alone in his bed, safely tucked inside the heavy stones walls of Hogwarts.

Snape knows he needs her. He thinks maybe, just maybe he can forget her, but it is not that simple. He is a brave person. He knows that. But he needs a confirmation.

He ventures out.

"Please, Mary, please?" he pleas to Mary McDonald, one corridor down from where he knows the Gryffindor Tower is. "I need to speak with her."

Mary only raises her eyebrows. "I never thought I'd ever see Severus Snape of all-"

He does not want to hear it. He knows his pleas are pathetic. He knows. She does not have to remind him. "Mary, please," he says one more time, his voice more snide now than desperate.

Mary gives him a once, twice, thrice over, then finally nods. "Fine, but I'll tell you now, she's not happy with you." She turns.

"I just want her," he says before he can stop himself.

She glances back, almost sadly, but he can see beyond that. She is disgusted with him. Her nose is upturned like when she is hit with the smell of a particularly nasty potion in Slughorn's class.

She stands still, surveying him, taking him in. Finally, she says, "I know."

But Mary's thoughts tell him there's more to those two words. I know.

He follows her until they get to a portrait of The Fat Lady. He pushes Mary's words from his mind and waits and waits with the portrait, who gives him the same look as Mary. She knows he is not wanted here. When Lily steps out, her eyes darker than he has ever seen, he moves forward.

"I'm sorry!" he says.

She's not interested. Of course not. He wants to follow her, but she says she has found her way and he has chosen his.

If this is his chosen way, he does not want this life.

This is when Snape feels the gnawing, the clawing, the personified loneliness he's tried for years to control. Strange how it has been numbed by Lily in the past and now the monster is now gripping its gnarly hands against his throat, trying to force him to stop and to cry as he makes his way back toward the dungeons. Not to his rooms, but to the broken classroom Lily and him have spent so much time in, together, with only one candle lit.

This is where Snape stays, wide awake, brewing and brewing to calm the creature he had never wanted again to haunt him. The screams and the insults and the smacks are recalled again, now that Lily is gone.

He never thought he could ever remember that so intensely again. Never.

But he does.

**Past. 17 Years Old.**

What Snape remembers is the hand holding and a different kind of gnawing in his throat as he sees James Potter and Lily Evans together as James-and-Lily.

He wishes it could be Sev-and-Lily. But it's not.

He's willing to admit it hurts. It hurts him to death because all along all he wanted to do was impress her. That fails.

**Past. 21 Year Old.**

Four years later, when he learns from Dumbledore that James-and-Lily have died, he sits in the chair across from the Headmaster, his head in his hands as if trying to hold the memories that abruptly begin to rush through his mind. He remembers her. He mourns her. He sees her body in his mind, there but not there at all. He wants to see her body just to see it once more.

How, how, how is her son alive. How dare he tell him he has her eyes, which once glittered against the one candle.

He escapes after minutes. He rushes down to that broken classroom again.

What do you think happens when we die? He remembers her asking years and years ago in the classroom he stands in now. He looks over to his right, expecting to see her there, but that is it. She has found out what happens to her, but she cannot tell him. She cannot see him. She cannot breathe and her eyes cannot shimmer in the candle light that illuminates the tears that have slipped off his face, splattered down to the table that is marked by many potion ingredients that Lily and he had once brewed together.

He is again gripped on the throat by sobs. He cannot breathe, but his heart still beats.

He is haunted by the memory of her.

**Present. 35 Years Old.**

What Snape remembers is seeing her body privately with Dumbledore, who kept a very careful eye on him as he entered the room with two caskets, one for Potter and one for her. He only sees one, though. There are two, but he only has his eyes out for one.

He remembers the intense calm that washes over him as soon as he sees her face, but as he gets closer, he realizes that she is Not There.

This is what he remembers as he watches Amos Diggory cry over his boy who has now also been murdered by the Dark Lord. He sees Potter clutching onto Diggory, yelling out to Dumbledore what has happened. As he does, Potter catches Snape's eye.

There are tears slipping down his face, shimmering in his eyes against the glow of torches lit up around the stands. Snape's throat becomes tight again.

He blinks, looking away, making his way toward Dumbledore. He cannot think of that. He cannot. He cannot afford to be haunted at that moment by her, not when the Dark Lord, who killed her, is back again.

He cannot think of her.

But what Snape remembers is that he is dead, too, just like Diggory and just like Lily. He is alive, but he is dead because he is only living for one thing. Her. He's living to keep her living boy safe.

The intensity of the pain that he feels watching Amos Diggory and Harry Potter is as pure as it had been when Lily left him. When Lily became James-and-Lily. When Lily… died.

It overwhelms him, overpowers everything he has taught himself about Occlumency. He needs to push those thoughts out of his head, but the pain radiates through him. He doesn't cry, but he can feel it in his nerves, which tingle like he has just tripped over a loose stone in the courtyard. It's even worse than the mark the Dark Lord has given him, the one that has burned for months and months. It now feels it has been reduced to the pain of a pinprick compared to… everything else.

At least his boy is still alive.

He keeps up his front, though. He stands with Dumbledore. He remains calm in this situation. Potter is alive.

He feels he has become soft as he ages, but then he remembers the loneliness he learned to blocked out. The screams and the insults and the smacks, though, weren't as bad as reliving the worst moment of his life.

He breathes. He blocks it out.

**Present. 37 Years Old.**

What Snape remembers is something he will never forget.

He stands, days months and years later, at the same spot, staring down at the broken desk.

He was once a student who had eyes for learning as much as he could to beat out the nimwits in his year, but had even brighter eyes for Lily Evans. Then, he was a Death Eater who only wanted to impress her. Next came double-agent and then the Hogwarts Potioneer after she died.

Now he is Headmaster. He does not truly want this life. He wants to go back and take back. He wishes he never called her a Mudblood and he wishes he never wanted to try to impress her.

He looks to his right.

"Lily."

He can see her in his mind turn her head, caught off guard. He smirks.

He will never forget her being there beside him. Really, that is all he has ever wanted.

He wonders where she is, what happened to her soul after she died. After all those years, he only knows that he can only think of her. He's doing everything for her, for her son.

He frowns.

He can see her eyes shimmering next to him, happy to be alive.

He is dead, he thinks, without her there. The place is desolate and lonely and silent. It is not filled with screams and insults and smacks, but somehow, it feels like it.

The heavy silence is practically tangible, like there is something there with him. He looks to his right again, where Lily has always been in his mind.

The castle is haunted.

But he is haunted only in his mind whenever he looks toward the boy with her eyes, whenever he looks to his right in the old classroom that he wishes had never become his place that trapped his loneliness. It used to be filled with her laughs and her cheerfulness, but now it is dark and cold. The candle is not lit.

The answer to his old question to her is simple, and he has always known it since their friendship- and she- died.

His biggest enchantment is her. She was all he ever wanted.

That is what happens when people die, he thinks… He is not as alone as he had believed for so many years.

Lily's presence remains in his heart, as bright as her eyes in the candlelight.

_A/N: I found this in my documents. According to my document info, I wrote it in 2011 when I was 20 years old. I don't remember if I ever posted it anywhere, but I decided to upload it because I actually kind of liked it when I reread it again recently. I tried googling it, but came up with nothing, but I was using this account at the time I wrote it and likely would have posted it here. _

_I think this may have been a word prompt challenge. _

_Also, I don't have The Goblet of Fire with me as I post this. I can't remember exactly what happened, like if Snape was with Dumbledore at all when Harry brings Cedric back. Just, uh, pretend this is correct if it's not._


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